The far horizons of peacebuilding – and the near

Peacebuilding and development can no longer be thought of in terms of what was always an over-simplified polarisation between the powerful stability of the giver and the weak turbulence of the beneficiary. It was always wrong to see the world that way; now it’s impossible.

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At the Gothenburg summit of June 2001, the EU summit decided
that the prevention of violent conflict was to be a priority. Since then it has
spent in the vicinity of 7.7 billion Euros, about 10 per cent of its total
spending on external aid, on conflict prevention and peacebuilding (which has
steadily – and rightly – replaced the former term in the international
vocabulary).

Demotix/Julio Etchart. Requiem for Croydon- after the London riots.All rights reserved.

The approach was adopted in a very different world when
Europe was full of expansive and optimistic vision. The Euro and the big
enlargement had been decided on. Economies were growing. It was less than three
months before 9/11, nearly two years before the invasion of Iraq, just over
seven years before Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering chaos in the financial
markets and the biggest financial crisis and global recession ever.

In 2001 the EU girded itself to build peace far beyond its
borders. In 2011 it couldn’t even manage to complete a ten-year review of what
it has done, though an effort to do so was initiated by the Hungarian EU Presidency
at the start of the year.

There has been an
evaluation by an independent consortium commissioned by the EC, focusing on
activities supported by EC money. It finds that the money has been well spent
overall with some good impact and nevertheless some things that could be done
better, the sort of balanced conclusion one expects from a review like this.

But perhaps, given the situation Europe is in, it is the
right time to go a little further, taking a fresh look rather than just
evaluating. And that means looking not just at peacebuilding and conflict
prevention but a little deeper.

Policies are often founded on assumptions that are not just
unquestioned but apparently unquestionable. They express a worldview. When
policies run into the sand, unless the worldview changes, those responsible for
implementation are told to refuel, rev up and drive harder. Such founding
assumptions are part of the anthropology of policy and politics and they need
to be brought out into the light by looking at unstated beliefs, unwritten
rules, silent norms, the way things are done – rather than just by looking at
policy positions, statements, decisions and actions.

Three
founding assumptions of peacebuilding – and, indeed, of international
development assistance – recommend themselves for a fresh look in these times:

It’s
for others;

It
comes from benevolent power;

It
brings its beneficiaries into a development trajectory that, roughly speaking,
is the same as ours.

Taking a look at these underpinnings of peacebuilding does
not mean that one is setting out to reject the whole edifice. Far from it in
the case of this article. But it does entail an acknowledgement that some
self-reflection could be most valuable.

It’s for others

The EU has always thought of peacebuilding as something for
‘out there.’ The grand enterprise of European unity was itself from the outset
a project of building peace and it has successfully created and spread a zone
of peace and stability. But this was an inherent attribute of the EU, a
spillover effect from its core functions. In Europe, it hasn’t needed to do much
that is particularly focused on building peace; it just had to go on trading
and regulating, steadily breaking down the barriers, and peacefulness resulted.

Conflict prevention and peacebuilding were conceived as an
extension of the EU enterprise to other regions that would only slowly (like
the western Balkans) join the EU and others that never would. This was about a
wealthy, stable and growing region offering others the benefits of its own
success and simultaneously acting self-interestedly to protect that success
from insecurity and instability in the wider global arena.

I don’t question that underlying motive. But I look around
Europe and I ask myself if peacebuilding is really only relevant for ‘out
there.’

No – us too

Everywhere we see
signs of disaffection and a leaning to violence. From last summer’s riots in
England to anti-austerity riots in Greece and the thin patina that many people
tell me stands between order and a similarly angry chaos in Ireland; from the
youth movements in Spain to the simmering anger in Italy; to the country
proclaimed by opinion surveys to be happiest in the world – Denmark, whose
capital has been scarred by school-burning and gang warfare in the last couple
of years; and from Breivik’s monstrous massacre on the island of Utoya,to immigrants murdered by right-wing
extremists in Germany, to the surging anger the far right is feeding on.

These are
different in form, in politics, in their social basis. Listing a few in the
same paragraph does not imply they can be equated. But consider the state of
the continent that they reflect.

Of course, not
all are mass actions and one was the action of a seemingly psychotic loner. But
none of these actions, regardless of the number involved – none is entirely
divorced from a social and political background of disaffection, a sense of
betrayal and exclusion, and an anger that is not far from violence. They occur
in a political and social landscape where people’s sense of social belonging
and engagement in the common good is challenged as never before. Job
opportunities and the belief in a better future diminish before our eyes.
Politics is professionalized and in most countries is ever more distant from
growing segments of the population, especially among the poor and among the
young.

So – no,
peacebuilding is not just for others. It can be brought home. The kind of
approaches that offer some degree of hope of stability and forward movement out
of repetitive cycles of violent conflict in other countries are worth looking
at here as well.

The benevolence of power

Closely related
to the ‘out there’ assumption, the world the EU saw a decade ago was one in which
the OECD countries – developed capitalist economies and democratic polities - had
the wealth and power and the rest of the world did not. It’s the world of
Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ in which the rich North will henceforth
have no grounds for internal conflict but outside of that zone is a world of
turmoil where, from time to time, the rich North may need to intervene.

The EU version of
this was considerably more subtle and far-sighted because the intervention
would be long-term, multi-faceted, and involving as little force as possible.
But the starting points were the same, albeit largely implicit.

Thus it went
without saying that what was willed would be done and what was done would be
effective. It might take time to get it right, there could be errors along the
way, it would be necessary to be self-critical, but when power went to work on
weakness – well, the power would work.

Er, what happened to the power?

Except, of
course, it’s not like that. That vision of the world doesn’t coincide with
reality at ground level and in fact it didn’t ten years ago either. There have
long been plenty of actors around, powerful in their arenas, whom neither the
EU nor the US could bend to their will, whether with aid, bribery or force. And
some of those actors are powerful in very large arenas.

About five or six
years ago, in a discussion of the longer range and broader questions of
peacebuilding and development with, for example, officials at the EC, DFID or SIDA, it would often be remarked late on in
the meeting that there was a topic we hadn’t quite discussed, an elephant in
the room. Today, China is not ignored. During the world recession it has
continued to grow. Its clout as fastest growing major economy and the holder of
massive amounts of American debt is undoubted. The December 2011 grand strategy
for the Eurozone bail-out included asking China to stump up some funds. The
markets stabilised at this, then China raised a quizzical eyebrow and the
markets resumed their normal haywire ways.

So, no,
peacebuilding and development can no longer be thought of in terms of what was
always an over-simplified polarisation between the powerful stability of the
giver and the weak turbulence of the beneficiary. It was always wrong to see
the world that way; now it’s impossible.

The development pathway

With our
economies stagnant, joblessness rising, growth next to invisible, politicians
impotent and politics alienating, plenty of people are asking what’s so
attractive about a development trajectory that leads to where we are. And
that’s before we even begin to think about environmental sustainability,
climate change and the pressures of demography.

There is a
well-established literature criticising development aid and, more recently,
peacebuilding as an export drive for a normative model of economics or politics
or both. The arguments are a bit shop worn these days because they tend to
overdo the role of development aid in exporting norms and over-simplify the
uniformity of social and political models among OECD countries. But there are
worthwhile insights there still and a very large part of the policy discussion among
European politicians and development NGOs unfolds without much reference to
them. Instead, that discourse has got itself tied up in predominantly two
things – money and measurable targets.

The thing about
money and targets is that they guide you towards working out how to do more of
the same only better. The next big issue for international development discourse
is the new set of targets to replace the Millennium Development Goals when
their target date comes round in 2015. Current projections indicate that by
2015 not a single MDG will be met in any conflict-affected and unstable
country. That is not something that better targets and more money will fix. It
is something that should precipitate a rethink. And part of that rethink ought to be
about the trajectory.

To which destination

In this respect,
peacebuilding is quite different, perhaps because it is newer. It is worth spending
time with the questions, what kinds of countries are stable and why? Both the
World Bank’s World Development Report
2011 and the independent Global Peace Index reflect this process of inquiry
and analysis.

The more the
development discussion keeps narrowly to targets and money, the more trouble it
has with the issue of destination. With no destination, there is no direction
for development assistance, there is only good works – a humanitarianism
chronologically extended beyond the humanitarian emergency, doing good but not
necessarily adding up to development.

That is the
challenge that the peacebuilding discussion is taking on by attempting to
identify the features of society that shape its prospects for peace – the peace
factors. And here it turns out
that, of course, there are features of relatively peaceful societies –
including our own – that recur in a variety of different forms and guises.
These are not only the principles of equality, however inadequately respected,
but the deep foundations of the institutions that are the basis of how are
societies run. (See the ground-breaking work
on institutions, social violence and development of D. C. North, J. J. Wallis
& B. R. Weingast, Violence and social orders: A
conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history,
2009.)

So, perhaps
surprisingly, yes, warts and all, recessions and riots notwithstanding, there
are things about western societies that make them attractive as development destinations.
On the other hand, the destination looks different from country to country –
sometimes slightly, sometimes significantly. And on the third hand, no,
arriving at these destinations is not going to be achieved through
recalibrating targets and spending more money on them.

Power and results

The first place
to look for some practical conclusions from this quick look at some of the
unstated assumptions underlying peacebuilding is not in the kind of actions
that are undertaken. It is initially in the way they are understood and
discussed. For example, the results agenda that now predominates in many
governments’ overseas aid policies is predicated on an untenable assumption
about power and effectiveness and has side-stepped thinking properly about the
development destination. It could go badly wrong, especially as it gets
transferred into the peacebuilding sector, by emphasising short-term results at
the expense of understanding that these results are but small steps on a long journey.
But if the results agenda can be contextualised by greater realism about power
and a clearer view of destination, it could be very helpful. It will mean a
downwards adjustment in the importance of individual results, which may sound
bad to a politician, and greater attention to cumulative impact. The outcome
could offer a useful map and compass for development aid and peacebuilding.

Destinations and the outsider

Of course, this
presupposes a better discussion of destination. Here the problem for
peacebuilding is the unwillingness of the much larger, better established
development sector to change. Too often the international development community
– NGOs, donors, international agencies – collude to present the key issues as
essentially technical. But they aren’t and everybody knows they aren’t. This
goes along with an unhelpful confusion between development and development aid
– the latter is a small part of the former. Everybody knows it
but only recently has it started to be respectable to say so. If there could be
more honest and precise discussions about destination, it could be better
understood that, so far as we know up till now, most peaceful societies have
some features in common, which get to be arranged in very different ways by the
ins and outs of culture and history. If a national political discussion
identifies which way to go, the question then is how can outsiders help?
There’s politics everywhere in this process, including in judging whether the
national political discussion is a genuine one. But development and
peacebuilding are political and it doesn’t help to duck it.

And then there’s
the perplexing issue of the outsider – the assumption that peacebuilding is for
others out there. Extending the mandate of peacebuilding to include the
problems within the EU would bring a new range of approaches to bear on
familiar problems. It’s at least an option worth exploring. Also of benefit, it
would change the way in which the enterprise of peacebuilding is presented,
discussed and operationalized. It is not an issue that is dead, even in
Scandinavian social democracies. Instead of treading dangerously close to
presenting peace as a good to be brought from here to there – which is nonsense
– it would allow us all to get on even terms, sharing with partners in the still
vital task of building a more peaceful and secure world.